Codeshares - nothing but a nuisance ?
It seems that as codeshares spread they cause all sorts of difficulties.
The Ceefax airport arrival pages on TV have been wrecked by the huge repetition of flights showing all the codeshares as individual flights. Sometimes they only get two flights to a screen. And some airport departure boards are the same.
The complete misunderstanding by average pax about who is operating their flight, especially where two codeshare partners operate the route. We PPRuNers probably don't notice this so much because we have a good idea who the operator is, but especially with direct jetway boarding people can believe they are on a completely different airline (fellow travellers recently on BA codeshare tickets on Finnair, Heathrow to Helsinki, couldn't understand why so much of the pre-flight announcement was in Finnish, and also wondered if BA had changed their uniforms. They had checked in with BA on BA tickets of course).
Differing service standards, like the OneWorld carriers that now charge for catering compared to AA or BA who don't, seems to cause much loss of goodwill.
The industry obviously realises it is a tricky issue as the operation by another airline is usually explained in an obscure corner hoping no one will read it or understand the cryptic language.
But why is more than one flight number per flight necessary ? It is quite straightforward to program the computers in reservation and frequent flyer systems to do all they have to without all these codeshare numbers at all.
What's the maximum number of codeshared flight numbers on any one flight ? Star Alliance seem to have some with about 6 different numbers.